Road traffic crashes are a global public health problem, contributing in 2013 to an estimated 1.3 million deaths annually, and mobile device use while driving has become an emerging concern. In 2011, online surveys of drivers aged 18-64 years revealed that the percentage of those who reported that they had talked on their cell phone while driving ranged from 21% in the United Kingdom to 69% in the United States, and the percentage of those that reported that they had read or sent text or e-mail messages while driving ranged from 15% in Spain to 31% in Portugal and the United States, as set forth in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Mar. 15, 2013.
To address the problem of mobile device use while driving, many countries consider examining the use of road traffic injury prevention strategies (e.g., legislation combined with high-visibility enforcement by police officers) that have been successful in reducing the prevalence of other road safety risk factors (e.g., alcohol-impaired driving and seat belt non-use). Additionally, the effectiveness of emerging vehicle and mobile communication technologies should be studied to assess their role in reducing crashes related to distracted driving.
On Mar. 12, 2014, the U.S. Department of Transportation, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) hosted a public meeting on the development of Driver Distraction Guidelines for Portable and Aftermarket Devices. Expert panelists included executives from AT&T, General Motors, Toyota, Cellepathy, and others, where it was noted that in the world of distracted driving there are two main categories of solutions: vehicle-based and device-based technologies.
Vehicle based approaches such as the approach described in U.S. Pat. No. 8,526,973 to Thomson require extra hardware which results in extra cost and which may not work on all vehicles. Moreover, when dealing with car improvements, the roll-out period may extend up to 20 years to disseminate to at least 90% of the vehicles in one particular country.
On the other hand, device based solutions such as the one described in U.S. Pub. No. 2014/0287738 to Abramson work in every vehicle, have no marginal cost, and may be deployed in a 4-years roll-out time frame, even nationwide. Available device-based systems generally comprise three basic functionalities: 1) “Car trip” detection; 2) Automatic Mandatory Driver Mode; and 3) Passenger Authentication (which allows to accurately authenticate who is holding the mobile device: a car passenger versus the driver, in order to solve the so-called “passenger problem.”
However, the advanced device-based available systems that incorporate the features above experience the following perceived shortcomings. Specifically, the systems: 1) are not “privacy-proof” up to a tunable degree; b) are not fully-seamless (for instance the Abramson approach requires a burdensome “Passenger Authentication Test”); c) are not adaptive to the specifics of “regional legislation” and/or “professional best practices/rules”; d) do not distinguish between all the possible “transportation means” in which the mobile device is eventually moving (i.e., car/truck versus any other transportation: metro, bus train, plane, etc.); e) do not provide “customized incentives” to improve Distracted Driving due to Talking and/or Texting on Mobile device (D2T2M) behavior; f) do not provide “personal analytics & mobile-based” coaching to improve the driver D2T2M behavior; and g) do not comprise two generic mode of operations: (device) connected to the Internet or not connected (pure local usage).